A Place to Stand

Comments from Scotland on politics, technology & all related matters (ie everything)/"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."Henry Louis Mencken....WARNING - THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS HAVE DECIDED THAT THIS BLOG IS LIKELY TO BE MISTAKEN FOR AN OFFICIAL PARTY SITE (no really, unanimous decision) I PROMISE IT ISN'T SO ENTER FREELY & OF YOUR OWN WILL

Friday, November 16, 2012

Twenty-EightGate - The BBC's latest scandal

This is the latest ThinkScotland article - I don't know if this is the first Scottish media report of 28gate but I suspect it may be, so it is a scoop, albeit, in the manner of the modern british media, not a scoop obtained in competition withy the rest but because the MSM now abjurs being first with news, until they know it is approved.

Please put any comments there.

I like the picture which was Brian Monteith's choice - it fits the Ministry of Truth image.

Twenty-EightGate - The BBC's latest scandal

by Neil Craig

IN THE MIDST of a storm of scandals about the BBC a new one runs the risk of not receiving the coverage it is surely due. Certainly the BBC is reticent in reporting it though it went viral online on 12th November..
For years the BBC has claimed that its propagandistic position of promoting the catastrophic global warming fraud, censoring the appearance of dissenters and even getting rid of anybody who refused to push the party line (e.g. Johnny Ball, Peter Sissons and the still very popular David Bellamy) was justified. The justification for this was that they claimed to have called, in 2006, a meeting of the country's 28 "best scientific experts" who had unanimously told them that there was no scientific doubt that we were experiencing catastrophic warming.
Tony Newbery, a retired viewer and sceptic sent the BBC a Freedom of Information Act request to find who these "leading scientists" were. The BBC refused to say.
Since then in appeal after appeal the BBC has spent tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of pounds, employing top barristers to prevent us knowing who the leading scientists they had chosen to ask really were. The BBC asserted that telling anybody would be a breach of its ethics and of journalistic secrecy. In the climate sceptic community this produced ...well, scepticism.
Then on Monday somebody found the names. The BBC, who had spent so much ot our money to prevent us knowing the strength of their case, had shared it with the International Broadcasting Trust, an "environmentalist" group who, it turns out, had helped them organise the meeting. They had put the 'secret list" online. Perhaps somebody had not told them about the BBC version of "journalistic integrity".
So who are Britain's 28 "leading scientists". There is a recently published list of Britain's 100 leading scientists and none of them are on it. There is an MP, a Church of England devine, representatives of Greenpeace (2), Stop Climate Chaos, the US government, BP, a "renewables" company director, and other "environmental" activists. Of the very few of these "leading scientists" who have any claim to being scientists one is a gentleman who has gone on record as saying what he does (which he calls "post normal science") is to tell those in power whatever they want to hear.
Such fraudulent propagandising would have embarrassed the old Soviet Union.
A recent World Bank report examined the role of government ownership of broadcasting. It found that the degree of ownership, particularly broadcasting ownership, closely correlated with the degree of authoritarianism, corruption, government incompetence, national poverty and even poor national healthcare. In its way this is unsurprising - the argument for a free press has always been that it means that failure gets noticed and something is done. But it is worth having it statistically pinned down.
Britain has one of the highest levels of state ownership of broadcasting in the developed world and indeed in the English speaking world. The BBC's justification is that it is different. Its charter requires it to be "balanced". That is indeed what the law says. It is not what the BBC does on a whole range of subjects; a few of them are now becoming public.
The BBC gives the Greens 40 times more coverage per vote, all of it deeply supportive, than UKIP, almost all critical while the "hacking scandal" became first item on BBC news, for months on end, just when Murdoch was planning to expand Sky TV and give them real competition. On almost every occasion the BBC will primarily, or only, interview people from government organisations or "charities" actually funded by government, who, without fail, demand more government regulation, civil servants and taxes.
I have written before on ThinkScotland of how the "environmental" agenda costs us, now we can see how the BBC has lied repeatedly over a period of years to maintain a political propogandist position not justified by the evidence. Propaganda which has certainly cost the British people many hundreds of billions of pounds and by more than doubling electricity prices, brought us into recession and nearly one million Scots households into fuel poverty.
We literally cannot have a free society without free media. The BBC is so arrogant and totalitarian it cannot now be reformed. If we wish freedom it must be abolished. Indeed I suggest that since the licence fee derives legally from their charter and they have vitiated the charter it has already abolished itself by these frauds.
I may be biased but I don't think "dead tree" journalism comes out of this with much credibility either.
This story is a scoop obtained by co-operative investigative journalism entirely on the internet. It was a blogger, Tony Newbery, who made an FoI request simply to know who had given the "best scientific advice." It was him, who kept up the pressure as the BBC refused to answer and brought in platoons of barristers, at great cost to our licence fees, to prevent us knowing what the BBC insisted "journalistic ethics" prevented it making public. It was another blogger who then found the list on the site of an environmental lobbyist the BBC had given it to.
The list of the 28 "leading scientists"http://omnologos.com/full-list-of-participants-to-the-bbc-cmep-seminar-on-26-january-2006/
This is a short bio of the producers of the BBC's "best scientific advice":
* Robert May, Oxford University and Imperial College London - undistinguished career until, as an alarmist, appointed Government Chief Science Advisor, then President of the government funded Royal Society and in due course a Lord - stated that religion may help society deal with climate change
* Mike Hulme, Director, Tyndall Centre, UEA - Mike Hulme, one of 4 nominal “scientists” on the panel of 28 “leading scientists” notoriously once wrote a Guardian article denouncing Professor Fred Singer for doing science the old fashioned way, with evidence, when his sort of “post normal science” which he said involved only finding what his paymasters wanted and saying it, is so much more lucrative.
Don’t believe anybody would be both corrupt enough to believe that and stupid enough to say it? http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/mar/14/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange
* Blake Lee-Harwood, Head of Campaigns, Greenpeace - has more than twenty years experience of developing and implementing advocacy and campaign programmes around the world on a wide range of issues.
* Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen - Danish climate scientist "The evolution of the big ice sheets is a very 'hot' subject and I beleive our ice and climate research is a very important contribution"
* Michael Bravo, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge - researcher in the History and Philosophy of Science, rather than actually doing it.
* Andrew Dlugolecki, Insurance industry consultant - not stated is that he consults for the notorious Climate Research Unit of climategate fame
* Trevor Evans, US Embassy - looking him up on Google appears to have been entirely unreported even on the internet till this news broke
* Colin Challen MP, Chair, All Party Group on Climate Change - MP not scientist
* Anuradha Vittachi, Director, Oneworld.net - internationally published journalist and an award-winning TV documentary-maker on global justice issues, and the author of acclaimed books on global survival - activist not scientist
* Andrew Simms, Policy Director, New Economics Foundation - Guardianist anti-capitalist activist not scientist
* Claire Foster, Church of England - Nuff said
* Saleemul Huq, IIED - International Institute for the Environment - not scientist
* Poshendra Satyal Pravat, Open University - wrote a book about forest management
* Li Moxuan, Climate campaigner, Greenpeace China - one of two Greenpeace reps
* Tadesse Dadi, Tearfund Ethiopia - Tearfund is to help "local churches overcome poverty" - eco-activist
* Iain Wright, CO2 Project Manager, BP International - businessman whose business depends on promoting the scare
* Ashok Sinha, Stop Climate Chaos - activist from government funded scare promoters
* Andy Atkins, Advocacy Director, Tearfund - 2 from the same charity
* Matthew Farrow, CBI - "CBI head of energy Matthew Farrow to join Environmental Services Agency" so making a career out of the climate scare
* Rafael Hidalgo, TV/multimedia producer - does not appear to have been on the internet in any other circumstances, possibly his TV production has not made him famous
* Cheryl Campbell, Executive Director, Television for the Environment - Cheryl trained as a journalist ...working for BBC ..Christian Aid...Cheryl is a trustee of the International Broadcasting Trust - no mention of studying to become a "leading scientist".
* Kevin McCullough, Director, Npower Renewables - businessman in industry dependent on warming scare induced subsidy
* Richard D North, Institute of Economic Affairs - Guardian's tame "right wing" commentator - not a scientist
* Steve Widdicombe, Plymouth Marine Labs - marine ecologist ...As a result he currently leads a large (£2m) consortium project examining the impacts of ocean acidification - he might call himself a scientist in the same way Hulme does -
* Joe Smith, The Open University - teaches environmental communication at the faculty of Social Sciences - PR flack not scientist
* Mark Galloway, Director, IBT - International Broadcasting Trust "one of our principal activities is lobbying" - not science
* Anita Neville, E3G - "environmental" activist group.
* Eleni Andreadis, Harvard University - "Green TV presenter" ,has worked with Joe Smith above
* Jos Wheatley, Global Environment Assets Team, DFID - Department of International Development - government flack not scientist at all
* Tessa Tennant, Chair, AsRia - Association for Sustainable Investment in Asia - In 1988 she co-founded the UK's first sustainable investment unit trust ..served on environmental advisory panels for the UK Government and HRH The Prince of Wales.
So it's not just that we have have only three scientists (May, Dahl-Jensen, Widdicombe - if you don't count Hulme as a scientist, which I don't), nor that it is simply loaded down with "environmental activists" and/or those making a very good living out of the scare, but also somewhat unexpected is the number of people whose prime interest is overseas development. Perhaps, desperate to get attendees, the BBC just asked the DFID if it could corral a few people to make up the numbers?
Also interesting is that despite there being only three scientists there are ten non-English names (not including Evans from the US embassy). That does seem to be statistically unusual even for a London-centric organisation.
It is nothing more than astonishing that, up until the BBC got all this leading scientific advice, in always claiming to be impartial or undecided, the BBC chose such a statistically improbable, unrepresentative and especially unqualified group to ask.
References -

Ecofascism - 2 Unpiblished Letters - Herald & Scotsman

"essential", "second to none. It is full of superb programmes", "should take care not to play into the hands of far less benign forces", "BBC is exemplary".

The online comments shown vary from anti-BBC to uncommitted.

I would like to congratualte the Herald on its diligence in censoring any written comment about our Ministry of Truth which might show any lack of respect.

I also congratulate you for censoring any mention of the 28gate scandal, which proves that the BBC has been deliberately lying to us to promote the global warming scare, despite it having gone viral in the blogsphere days ago. This is the attitude that has made British journalism what it is today. (put as another letter to them a few minutes ago)

Sir,The defence of the BBC by Ian Bell on Wednesday amounts to saying "They are the great & mighty, government owned BBC, trust them, ignore the blogsphere behind the curtain".He could hardly have timed it worse. On the same day newspapers first started reporting the BBC's 28gate scandal, which has been viral on the net for several days previously (the BBC has, as I write, yet to report).This is a scoop obtained by co-operative investigative journalism entirely on the net. For 6 years the BBC have claimed that their censorship of any dissent on the catastrophic global warming issue was justified because they had held a meeting of Britain's 28 "leading scientists" who had agreed the "science" of catastrophic warming was unimpeachable. It was a blogger, Tony Newbery, who made an FoI request simply to know who had given the "best scientific advice." It was him, who kept up the pressure as the BBC refused to answer and brought in platoons of barristers, probably costing over £100k of our money, to prevent us knowing what the BBC insisted "journalistic ethics" prevented them making public.It was another blogger who then found the list on the site of an environmental lobbyist the BBC had given it to.It turned out that of the 28 only 3 were scientists, all paid tom promote alarmist. None had done "leading" work on the subject. The rest were an odd collection of Greenpeace (2) and other "environmental charity" activists, renewables salespersons, civil servants (including a US one) and a surprising number managing 3rd world "aid."The BBC lied, repeatedly over a period of years to maintain a political propaganda position not justified by the evidence. Propaganda which has certainly cost the British people many hundreds of billions of pounds & by more than doubling electricity prices, brought us into recession and nearly 1 million Scots households into fuel poverty. It seems inevitable that much of the testimony given by a whole range of BBC employees in court must be untrue. The police who spent £2 million on prosecuting Sheriden must, on this issue where the evidence is so much easier to obtain, be equally diligent.

The Scotsman is much better. My letter to them is a response to Naill Stewart of Scottish Reneables & they have published 3 other letters taking him apart over the figures. Still I think my letter, which goes more to criticising the paymasters of warming propaganda (a subject which astonishingly never gets reported by the MSM) is a good one. Well I was amused by it.

Your reader Niall Stewart calls us global warming sceptics a "vocal minority" (letter today). Polls tend to show those of us who doubt catastrophic warming is evident are actually a majority. However is he not thereby castigating himself? After all he is one the army of people who have, over the years, received hundreds of billions of pounds from government to promote warming alarmism, renewables, and other "environmental" scares and their expensive big government nostums. If we sceptics are "vocal" compared to all that, are he and his chums, with the recent refusal of him or any other government funded alarmist to enter a public debate on the subject, not falling down on the job? Even despite his own regular appearances as a reader in newspaper letters across Scotland and equally regularly in news items.

My main message is underlined at the bottom. It is, as ever, fairly optimistic.
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The reviewer is being slightly pedantic in objecting to the writer using jobs and tax receipts as markers for growth. Space activity also generates economic growth and tax receipts" (p. 8). These supporting arguments ignore the important fact that jobs are not the goal of the economy. We want the output from jobs, not the jobs themselves. This distinction is important, because any policy that subsidizes an industry in the effort to make sure that the industry hires workers is inevitably promoting a misallocation of those workers' skills. Superseding market prices for labor means that the other industries that had a more productive use for those workers (maybe in space flight, maybe not) must forego those workers. This reduces economic growth. The tax-revenue argument has more serious problems. Taxes simply extract value from individuals and transfer that value to a government-determined purpose This is, after all a book aimed at everybody. In any case, at least until such time as flight to space is as cheap as flying to Australia (that day will come) it is going to be a more capital than jobs intensive industry.
He is on better ground complaining about the Moon & Space treaties. The inability to establish title to property in space is perhaps the greatest single brake on development. With water found on the Moon investing in getting there first should be an enormous driver of settlement. The comparison with railways in the US, made possible by the government giving title to those who first built them is obvious.With Obama re-elected the last chance for big governments to control space may have gone. If commercial space is largely developed in the name of small low tax regimes (Singapore & Abu Dhabi are both working hard to be hubs) a libertarian future for humanity off planet may be near. If so the fact that humanity is at least 20 years behind where we could have been in space industrialisation, may be a blessing, at least for future generations.

This week BBC Scotland's Sunday Politics did a piece about taking more children into social work "care". They were, naturally, all in favour of more of it. The "balanced" BBC did a supportive video report folowed by 3 talking heads - 2 workers in the "caring" industry and BBC interviewer Isabel Fraser in the normal supportive Beeboid manner.

The point being sold was that the old idea of taking kids into custody only when some ill treatment is found, or suggested, is now outdated. In our modern society social workers should be grabbing them when they find, or claim to find "neglect".

"Neglect is notoriously difficult to define as there are no clear, cross-cultural standards for desirable or minimally adequate child rearing practices......the persistent failure to meet a child’s basic physical and/or psychological needs, likely to result in the serious impairment of the child’s health or development. .....neglect may involve a parent or carer failing to provide adequate food, clothing and shelter); protect a child from physical and emotional harm or danger; ensure adequate supervision (including the use of inadequate care-givers); or ensure access to appropriate medical care or treatment. It may also include neglect of, or unresponsiveness to, a child's basic emotional needs.....the failure of a person responsible for a child’s care and upbringing to safeguard the child’s emotional and physical health and general well-being"

Most of this is subjective, unprovable ... and undisprovable. Particularly when it goes through "special" non-courts where justice not only need not be seen to be done but regularly bans any reporting.

When "professional carers" can and do grab a kid purely because his mother has political views the "carer" disapproves of (ie supporting the EDL) can any parents can be sure their chidren are safe?

One point which emerged from the programme is that in Scotland the number of children in "care" is over 16,000, but is over 89,000 in the UK as a whole. This is 18% for a country that makes up 8% of the population. So your child is 2.5 times more likely to be taken from you by our government. Does anybody think Scots care 2.5 times less for their children. I don't but the only other answer is that our bureaucracy are 2.5 times more aggressive.

Numbers of children seized are rising - is this because there is more neglect, lack of supervision and absolute poverty than there was a generation or 2 ago. I don't but the only other answer is that our empire building bureaucracy are more aggressive than they used to be.

I quoted Dr Pournelle last time "the purpose of government programmes is to pay government employees and their friends, the nominal purpose is secondary, at best". This is very much what researchers in Public Choice Theory have found across the board. The nominal purpose of "professional caring" for children is caring for children but that makes the real purpose to provide employment, promotion & underlings to the "carers". This helps explain how children like baby Peter, whose parents were violent drug addicts don't get visited whereas ordinary inoffensive people do - and get outrageously bullied by them.

As a general rule of thumb government departments usually spend about £100,000 per year per employee. I suspect child care costs will actually be higher than that, since there are employees in addition to that and because there is an attitude of heavy spending . £300 taxi fare to take a child to the room next to a court, then not allowed to speak; lots of expensive lawyers; and individuals, sometimes without any qualifications, make up to £500,000 a year for producing reports, 2/3rds of them "poor" or worse, which support the "carers who paid for them. All the stuff Booker has been reporting but the rest of the media censor. That would make the cost of this "care" well over £9 bn a year - for government activity which, rather than helping, ruins lives, bringing those who really are "the most vulnerable in society" into the hands of abusers.

Now who could want something like that. Well the MPs of the education select committee who just demanded more chidren be put in such homes for one and the BBC, who break their own legal duty of balance to ensure only the "professional carer" view is reported for another.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

14/15ths Of Cable Cost "Goes Walkabout" - Courier Letter

I am no fan of windmills - they are 10 times the cost of conventional power, intermittent, unreliable and tend to destabilise the smooth voltage on which the grid and modern technology depend - however I have sympathy with windmiller's dismay over the price increase, to £775 million, of a cable between the western Isles and the mainland.

The Aberdeen bypass, at £23.3 million a mile is 8 times more expensive than new roads across the EU & US are. The same applies to the Forth tunnel which is 8 times more expensive, after adjusting for inflation, than the previous Forth bridge.

By comparison, a few years ago, Norway signed a contract with Nexans to lay a much longer cable (292km) at a cost of $98 million (then about £50 mill) in the North Sea. This seems to be the normal cost in the rest of the world. Thus in this case we are greatly exceeding the normal situation of Scottish public projects costing 8 times what they do elsewhere. In this case it looks like well above 15 times.

Before the Forth crossing contract was signed I e-mailed every MSP asking why so much of the money goes walkabout but got only one, not entirely coherent, reply.

Can none of our elected leaders tell us why everything they do costs us so many times more than it would elsewhere in the world and where the money they take from us goes?

Monday, November 12, 2012

From the Jerusalem Post. Never reported by the obscene, racist, lying, censoring, propagandists of our own media. Lets not ever pretend that anybody who criticises Israel without criticising the the organmlegging child raping Nazi war criminals in westminster 1,000 times more is anything other than a racist Nazi or the dupe of Nazis:

This past September 11, Western leaders hailed the “fully” and “irreversibly” independent Kosovo – still unrecognized by most UN members – for achieving additional “full independence.”
The International Steering Group’s Civilian Office, which had the power to block laws or ministerial appointments, closed up shop, and Dutch international representative Pieter Feith gave a speech in Albanian which concluded that “Kosovo has realistic prospects” for EU membership.
The ISG – composed of American, European and Turkish overseers – explained its decision to grant Serbia’s Albanian separatists this full autonomy by citing the region’s “clear support of a democratic and multi-ethnic state.” US President Barack Obama said Kosovo has made “significant progress,” parroting Kosovo prime minister Hashim Thaci, who said that “Kosovo has made significant progress... in building the institutions of a modern, multi-ethnic, inclusive and democratic state.”

The Wall Street Journal praised Obama’s praise and editorialized in typical Slavophobic tones about how in 1999 president Bill Clinton had “bypassed the United Nations and sent in the US Air Force... president [George W.] Bush stood up to Russian bluster and European ambivalence to push for its independence....
though Serbia and Russia have tried to undermine it.”
AND YET at this moment our National Guard soldiers, in conjunction with German, Austrian, Hungarian, Croatian, Slovenian and other Axis allies – have their guns trained on the reluctant Serbs, in preparation for a final solution to the “northern problem.” The climate has turned explosive as the police – stocked with former KLA terrorists-cum-freedom-fighters – have been given increased autonomy, which on June 28 they used to harass, undress, drag and beat Serbian pilgrims coming for the Patriarch’s liturgy on St. Vitus Day.
To seal the next stage of Kosovo’s dark evolution, KFOR will dismantle the last of the barricades, during which we are likely to see a provocation – used intermittently to goad Serbs into reacting – which then will “necessitate” forceful action to finally integrate them into Kosovo’s institutions. This will achieve a de facto acceptance of Kosovo as reality and, for our part, the fulfillment of Albanian territorial demands.
The Serbs will be the ones fingered, yet again, for causing the problems – since that’s whom NATO troops are being pitted against as they extend the thugocracy to the north. Just in time, the otherwise sparse cameras will be invited back in, to get the approved Kosovo story, reinforcing the edifice of lies upon which “the world’s newest country” is built.
“KFOR announces reinforcements with the new unit that should discipline Serbs in northern Kosovo,” is how Radenko Nedeljkovic, head of Kosovska Mitrovica county, put it. He called on Serbs not to be provoked but to continue with peaceful means of staying in Kosovo.
However, the organized Kosovo-wide pogroms of March 2004 – one of those truly defining events that nonetheless manages to slip into Balkan oblivion – gave us a taste of their likely fate, should they stay in an independent Kosovo.
Internationals there noted that the deadly riots only stopped when Thaci and Kosovo’s Security Forces Minister Agim Ceku said “stop” – three days in. Forty-thousand Serbs fled the province then, joining the 200,000 who had fled upon the terror unleashed by the KLA as NATO’s ground force in June 1999. The pogrom was a message to the international community to move faster on independence. It was successful.
Our Kosovo intervention “demonstrated to the world that terrorists can indeed successfully alter the borders of sovereign nations,” read a recent letter in this newspaper by reader Michael Pravica, “and encourages secessionists the world over as national borders unravel because of the desecration and erosion of international law.”
ATTESTING TO the State Department’s vast efforts on behalf of its ill-begotten progeny, Thaci’s byline has been popping up in American newspapers, where he called the end of supervision “a recognition that Kosovo has evolved into a mature, independent democracy,” and referred to Kosovo as a “success story for democratic values.”
This is a man whose criminal history and countless rackets are legendary in Albania. A recent two-year Council of Europe investigation exposed that Hashim “the Snake” Thaci “is the head of a ‘mafia-like’ Albanian group responsible for smuggling weapons, drugs and human organs,” read The Guardian in December 2010.
These are more than mere accusations, as several Albanians recently have risked their lives to come clean about what they witnessed in 1999-2000 as guards of the holding pens, drivers of the doomed, and organ-deliverers.
A notorious gangster widely known to have killed his own roommate, Thaci executed his political rivals including six of his lieutenants the very week he was meeting with then-US secretary of state Madeleine Albright. In February 2002, a UN Mission in Kosovo police officer told the Reality Macedonia news site how he was ordered to nix the investigation of a close Thaci associate named Kadolj, who had the KLA evicting people and collecting illegal taxes for Thaci’s party, the PDK (Democratic Party of Kosovo). Kadolj further “threatened to kill the local UNMIK administrator... [when he] was asked to move his office out of the Municipality building.”
Thaci’s predecessor, Ramush Haradinaj, also a prolific killer, was airlifted to a US hospital in 2000 after he started a gunfight with a rival clan. US officials from Camp Bondsteel removed evidence in the case and suppressed the investigation, according to The London Observer of September 10, 2000, and AFP on October 25, 2000.
In the course of his 2007 war crimes trial at The Hague, several witnesses were killed and others were threatened and dropped out.
“United Nations prosecutors in The Hague accused him of having organized the slaughter of civilians during the war,”

Mothers, children, simple farmers. Christ, like pigs in a ditch. He has always denied it.”

Kosovo is a gangster’s paradise where even the newspapers publish threats against journalists as “letters to the editor,” in defense of the homicidal officials who subsidize the papers through ads. This “modern democracy” is ruled by fear, with a mafia grip over the population, some of whom are now commenting that there were never such media constrictions under Belgrade.
LAST YEAR, a Foreign Policy article titled “Thug Life” called Washington out for entrenching an elite that operates above the law: “It is difficult to see how democracy or respect [for] the rule of law could develop and flourish amid such overt displays of American support for a corrupt and criminal leadership... [It] has undercut efforts to pursue indictments for war crimes and investigate high-level corruption.
The war crimes... have never been fully investigated – in fact, in some cases they have been covered up.”
In early 1999, some newspapers tried to give Americans a sense of the nature and genesis of Thaci’s narco-terrorist KLA, which had been a purely criminal outfit until we ruthlessly backed and rebranded it. But with none of the bad news sticking, today we are helping seal a fait accompli of yet another terror-won, ethnically pure state in the Balkans. In this case, a second Albanian state that will eventually form a Greater Albania, as was the ultimate goal, and the open secret, from the start.
The EU and NATO likewise are talking Kosovo membership already, while putting Serbia off until it says “Uncle (Sam).” In other words, a Muslim non-country is on a faster track than an ancient Christian country that was a founding UN member.
Now having a creeping sense that “liberated Kosovo” was only ever intended as a base of criminal operations, lawful-minded Albanians and Serbs alike should demand that some of the compromise solutions that had been swept off the table be put back on.

Presumably members of the British media, if ever forced to answer, would say that the British govenment, undeniably complicit in racial genocide, child rape and dealing drugs and murdering people to deal in their organs can't be 1,000th as "newsworthy" as far lesser, unproven, allegations against whicherver country we are next to bomb or they would give it 1,000th as much coverage.